# we enter here with a hostname $host and must look it up
# in a file containing details for >100K hosts
open FH, $hosts_file or die "something appropriate\n";
while () {
($a,$b,$c,$d)=split $_, /\t/, 4;
# first entry in each line is hostname
# $b is the data we need for the host
$hash{$a}=$b;
}
if (exists $hash{$host}) {
return $hash{$host}
} else {
return error
}
# needles to say %hash was global, well everything was
# and %hash used again